YOUR MAMAS NOTES: In an era when foreclosures, falling home prices, and real estate doom and gloom is the order of the day, it's easy to forget that a lot of rich people are still filthy, stinking, vaingloriously rich and tossing big money around on palatial properties like it was 2005. One such Daddy Warbucks is Texas energy executive Kelcy Warren who recently forked over a spectacular amount of money for the undeniably lavish and architecturally dignified Dallas, TX estate of software tycoon Larry Lacerte and his wifey Joyce.

Your Mama first learned of the tremendous transaction from dee-voon Dallas real estate gossip Candy Evans who spilled the juicy beans about the purchase back on June 17. According to information provided to the enviably well informed Miss Candy, the 8.7 acre estate on posh Park Lane in the pricey Preston Holler* area of Dallas was first quietly shopped around last year with a hair raising asking price of $45,00,000. That rumored figure was reportedly reduced to a still hair raising $40,000,000. Then, according to Miss Candy, along comes Warbucks Warren who is believed to have dropped somewhere around $30,000,000 for the property. If true, and we have no reason to believe it is not because Miss Candy does not fool around with her facts, the sale would represent the largest amount of money ever paid for a pad in Old Preston Holler.

Texans proudly declare that, "Everything is Bigger in Texas" and children if y'all have ever been to Texas–and Your Mama most surely has–then you know them sun-kissed tawny Texans love them some big trucks, big churches, big hair, and big bank accounts. At a boo-teek hotel-sized 26,620 square feet, the Lacerte/Warren mansion certainly lives up to that beloved stereotype. Property records show the English-y, ivy covered and multi-winged monster-manse was built in 1992 and includes garaging for 12 cars, 6 bedrooms and 16 terlits** divided among 10 full and 6 half poopers. Have mercy. Your Mama hopes the Warrens get on the telephone to a reputable domestic employment agency right quick because they are going to be in serious need an army of minimum wage gurls to keep all those beds made and terlit bowls dinner plate clean. They will also, presumably, require a busload of well-coiffured and tight-panted nice gay decorators to be up in their new crib spending their money on the sort of swagged drapery, 18th century commodes, porcelain snuff boxes, Fabrege doodads and Louis the Something gewgaws that will make their new money look old.

Unfortunately we know precious few details about the interior spaces of the monster mansion, but there are reportedly loads of elaborate carved woodwork, cast hardware and hand-cut stone, natch. According to Miss Candy's report, the recreation facilities include a racquetball court, an exercise room, a wine cellar and tasting room, a bowling alley, tennis court, a children's play ground, a damn baseball diamond with a lighted scoreboard, a small lake, an orange conservatory next to the interlocking Koi ponds where it is rumored the Lacertes kept more than a million clams worth of Koi and, hold on to your britches kids, a near-Olympic-sized natatorium with adjacent locker rooms. A natatorium! Good grief.

After checking around with a couple of Your Mama's peeps in the Big D we learned that word on the real estate gossip grapevine down Dallas way is that Mister Warren is carrying a fourteen million dollar mortgage on the property. We can not confirm that figure but just thinking about a fourteen million dollar mortgage makes Your Mama need a damn nerve pill.

Preston Holler is one of Dallas' finer and most expensive neighborhoods where many of the swank streets are lined with mansions that make Beverly Hills look like the damn ghetto. The Holler is home to Texas bigwigs like H. Ross Perot, T. Boone Pickens, Mark Cuban, actor Luke Wilson and of course, our esteemed former president George W. Bush and his librarian ladee-mate Laura.

*Your Mama is well aware that the neighborhood is called Preston HollOW and not Preston HollER, but we like saying Holler.**Since there was no official listing for the property, these figures are from public property records and may or may not reflect an accurate count of bedrooms and poopers.

41 comments:

Apart from that industrial looking tin roof in the overhead shot, it looks pretty wonderful to me. I would love to see some interior shots. Thanks for the weekend candy Mama. I bet you were up early watching Venus.

I've seen the house and it's pretty fabulous, not to mention how rare it is to find 8 acres in such a prime area. The Lacertes built the house and have pockets too deep to cut corners on construction or details. I'd guess a similar estate of this size on this land in Holmby Hills or Bel-Air would be shopped in the $75M range. If you have to live in Dallas and want privacy and space, only a handful of properties (none for sale even off the market that I'm aware of) could compete.

Anon 9:53......I would rather design and plant my own gardens. There is plenty of room and they obviously can afford it. Completely designed and finished gardens can be as limiting, or even offputting, as a house's floorplan. This would be a great canvas for garden design. I was even imagining the additional gardening space available after getting rid of that metal roofed structure.

When the US economy collapses in hyper-inflation and a flight from the dollar in 2011 or 2012, I wonder what might happen to this monument to excess? I mean when the French government could not pay its debts in 1789, pretty soon the "little people" took control and Versailles was turned into the museum it is today.

9:34 / You're right. The moron agents in LA would shop the land at $75M and never come close to getting anywhere near a number like tat. When was the last time a piece of land WITH a house sold for $75M in LA? With the exception of Winnick's house (at $94M in) I can't think of any.

Just look at Jon Peter's 6.5 acre partially developed property on Tower...started at $39.5M, down to 19.995 and still ain't nobody biting.

And all those $20M monsters up in Beverly Park that aren't moving either. Get a grip and remind yourself that LA is hardly the only insanely expensive real estate market in the US and the heyday of exhorbitant trophy prices is over. At least for the forseeable future.

9:40 / As for the threadbare lawns, it's winter...lawns get funky in the winter in most parts of the country. Trust me...that property is anything but threadbare.

Kelcy L. WarrenChief Executive OfficerChairman of the Board of Directors

Kelcy Warren is Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Energy Transfer Partners, L. P. (ETP). Mr. Warren also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the general partner of Energy Transfer Equity, L. P. (ETE). Prior to the combination of the operations of ETP and Heritage Propane in 2004, Mr. Warren co-founded the entities that acquired and operated the midstream assets that were contributed in the merger. From 1996 to 2000, Mr. Warren served as a Director of Crosstex Energy, Inc. and from 1993 to 1996, he served as President, Chief Operating Officer and a Director of Cornerstone Natural Gas, Inc. Mr. Warren has more than 25 years of business experience in the energy industry.

And how do these two characters rate posting in a "celebrity" blog. Super rich does not equal celebrity. Gawd there are super mansion all over the country. Nice to drool over, but it's the sellers/buyers that are the celebrity -- not the dirt, bricks and mortar.

All due respect, but you obviously haven't been reading this blog for long and clearly you've never read the disclaimer with says "The Real Estalker provides information about high-end and celebrity real estate..."

So actually, Mama talking about big deals like this is fully in accordance with what he set out to do and in fact has done all along.

If you don't want to read about non-celebrity deals, then don't. But don't complain about it because it's just plain rude.

Hey Jimmy........I think that the dirt, bricks, mortar, architecture and garden design are the celebrities. The human beings who own the properties are the icing but the houses are the cake! I doubt that many of us would tune in to view the floor plan porn of a celebrity rambler.

A Natatorium is technically a "seperate structure containing an indoor swimming pool"...this pool looks to me to be completely attached to the main residence, which means someone is just trying to be pretentious and show of their vocabulary word of the day skills, LOL

Definitely the most beautiful area in Dallas. Lacerte also owned the house behind this one (facing Falls Rd. at the corner of Meadowbrook) - it's a "regular" Old Preston Hollow home that typified the area before the tear-down craze...wonder if he sold it, too?

loved this write up, esp. "ladee-mate"...i almost spit out my coffee when i got to the end, tho since the whole time i was reading it i kept thinkin, preston hollER" ?? how loretty lynn of them texans...

the people are rude, materialistic and shallow... fake both in the sense of who and what they are as people and phsycially fake - plastic til the day is long with fake teeeth and fake boobs... gee that what makes me feel at home

its odd that LA is the only place on the planet that no one is impressed with a sucessful dr attorney, business man its all about the entertainment industry... once again... shallow

Apparently almost no one here has ever been anywhere. There are toothless hillbillies all over Calif. (including in some of the outlying areas of LA) and there are shallow, materialistic people living the country life in Nashville too.

Woman in St. Louis get fake tits and there are country music fans in New York City. There are plenty of flashy new money types in Atlanta and many dignified wealthy people in the Detroit area. There are rich and educated black people and there are poor and ignorant white people and every type of person in between.

How can anyone be so narrow minded to say something like all people in LA are materialistic or that all people in Tenn. are toothless?

Frankly, making those kinds of absurd statements only makes a person look ignorant.

I will agree however, that i don't see how NASCAR is a sport. It's not in the Olympics or anything, right? It might be entertaining. It might be an event. It might take some steady nerve to drive 200 miles an hour for a couple hours, but a sport? Not in my book.